Dom & Roland

Fresh from dropping his enormously well received album on Metalheadz, the dark lord of DnB invites us into his studio to watch him work on a new track

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A true DnB veteran, Dominic Angas has been making epic dance floor anthems for more than two decades. Starting off on No U-Turn spinoff Saigon, he spent a lengthy portion of his career creating a slew of seminal tracks for the legendary Moving Shadow records, and has also had releases on Doc Scott’s 31 Records, Fierce’s Quarantine, Goldie’s Metalheadz, and his own Dom & Roland Productions.

Shortly after the release of his seventh album, Last Refuge of a Scoundrel, we smuggled ourselves into Dom’s West London studio to get an exclusive look at an as-yet untitled work-in-progress track, and to ask him some important questions about his approach to production.

Computer Music: Your ‘Dom & Roland’ moniker is a reference to the hardware sampler you used back in the day, the Roland S-760. How is Roland these days? Dominic Angas:

“I turned it on a couple of months ago because I found all my discs in the loft – all the old 3.5" floppies. I spent about two days loading them in and playing stuff out of the outputs into the computer, then I threw the whole lot away. I’ve kept Roland though, obviously! Everything is in the computer now. Hardware sampling is just a bit long, isn’t it?”

cm: The album sounds very loud.

DA: “That really wasn’t my intention, I was trying to make the album 3dB quieter than everyone else’s, but it didn’t turn out that way in the end. I don’t normally look at these things, but there was a thread on [popular DnB forum] Dogs on Acid recently about the mastering on the LP, saying it was way too distorted and loud.